Clancy: The rumbling songs of summer

It was love at first sight and it endured for more than two decades, until Paul Padjur could claim his magnificent obsession.

A long haul independent trucker – “I could make Denver in two days, breaking every law in the books” – Padjur spotted her in rural Ohio.

“I was on the back roads, probably avoiding scales, when I saw it up on a lift in a garage,” said Padjur, 63, now retired. He was late, chewing up the in-between and didn’t stop, but never stopped thinking about the 1965 Ford Galaxy.

Four years ago, looking for classic cars for sale on a website, the Galaxy reappeared.

“My first thought was, ‘Can it be?’” Padjur said. “A guy in Flagstaff, Ariz., had it for sale.”

He called and spoke to the seller who confirmed it was the beauty he’d originally spotted on that sleepy Midwestern back road. A trip to Arizona and $29,000 later, the car was his.

One evening last week the 425-horsepower Galaxy, with a paint job that would put a fire engine to shame, was in a parking space – looking fast even standing still – at the Key Food shopping center on Indian Head Road in Kings Park.

Keeping it company were more than 60 other classic cars that can be found there every Thursday evening from May through September.

It’s a Long Island tradition, “the car cruise, as opposed to the car show,” said Bob Marketta, standing next to his 1969 Mustang.

“A show is where you have judges, prizes,” Marketta said. “A cruise you just show up.”

The cruises are found in parking lots all over the Island, every long summer evening of the week. No organization, no newsletter, no dues or entry fees. Just passion, beauty and pride.

Padjur, like the rest of the owners showcasing their wheels in Kings Park, is carrying on something that began in the 1950s.

“I owned a car when I was 11,” he said, infected with the car bug from his older brother growing up in Hempstead.

Padjur remembered saving his dimes from lawn mowing and delivering papers to come up with $50, then dragging an old junker home and getting lost under the hood.

Long Island car culture is like jazz – if you don’t get it no one will ever be able to explain it to you. But there’s no harm in trying.

How to trace the genesis of this passion? Combine a migration, a man with an ego bordering on megalomania, toss in a Mediterranean courtship ritual and you begin to see how a fuel-injected culture took root here.

The migration was the movement of returning World War II veterans from the city to open spaces eastward. The man with the plan was Robert Moses, who, armed with powerful political patrons and his own energy and will, paved over the Island, building the Long Island Expressway and the parkways, dooming any chance for a mass transit system.

And then handed-down folklore from the old country completed the gas-guzzling phenomenon, according to writer Sheila Weller.

Weller teases out the meaning of customizing cars by looking at the heirs of young southern Italian and Sicilian bachelors who decorated their donkey-powered carts with vivid, eccentric colors and patterns to tickle the fancies of young ladies on the hunt for men with verve, passion and wit.

When the second and third generations of young Italian men growing up on the Island in the 1950s got their own cars, they began to put their own marks on them. Their buddies, even those whose grandfathers hailed from County Clare or Minsk, got some clues on how to catch the eye of a cute bobby-soxer.